Kingston Technology 2011 Market Predictions in Response to Data Explosion and Demand for Intelligent Devices

John Tu, President and Co-founder Talks Virtualisation, iPads, SSD and Memory Market Trends

SUNBURY-ON-THAMES, England, December 9, 2010 - John Tu, President and co-founder of Kingston Technology, the independent
world leader in memory products, discusses his predictions for 2011, as
businesses and consumers adapt to new and intelligent devices designed to
deal with the massive explosion of data. Tu sees developments in the solid
state drive (SSD), increasing adoption of cloud computing and the need for
consumers to change the way they manage and store data as the key issues for
next year.

Revolutionising the use of SSDs

Whatever CIOs are planning for the next year or two, they must ensure
that they have investigated the impact that NAND/ Flash based technology
solutions can have on guaranteeing the success of their strategy. In 2010 SSD
technology was at the tipping point, where wider adoption driven by the need
for better performing client devices resulted in a rapid reduction in the
cost per gigabyte. We expect this trend to continue in 2011 as enterprises
adopt SSDs to upgrade the performance of client devices and look to "sweat
their assets" for longer. Businesses will not only reap an immediate ROI but
they will also see increased performance of their employees.

With the ever increasing volume of data we expect to see SSD become the
prominent form of internal client storage within the next five years,
particular in business. That said, we also expect SSD and HDD to coexist for
some time to come on the consumer computing platform (where migration to the
cloud, for example, may take longer), with SSD driving the performance of
boot, OS and high usage applications, and HDD continuing to store data.

In 2011, as SATA 3.0 becomes more common, SSD technology will evolve to
change the way computer systems are designed forever, particularly in the
industrial and embedded environments. The integration of new SSD form factors
into computerized devices will enable industries such as automotive and
manufacturing; and applications such as ATMs and CCTVs to benefit from
increased performance, reduced failure rates over HDDs and added endurance to
extend the lifecycle of the system.

Tapping the potential of Memory Virtualisation

There has been a great deal of discussion about cloud computing for the
last few years, and although expectations were running high the hype has not
lived up to the noise yet. Despite developments in SAP software as a service
(SaaS) adoption and more applications on the market, constraints such as data
centre bandwidth and data security still need further development before we
see mass adoption. In 2011, we will see a greater need for more
virtualisation as the corporate market continues to see the benefits of
"doing more with less" by building out virtual server environments. As
virtualization continues to increase, core components like processing and
memory will be on the agenda as businesses look to create efficient ways to
deal with the ever increasing amounts of data.

Technology leap of USB 3.0

USB 3.0 with 10 X faster theoretical transfer speed to USB 2.0 means that
USB has now become a viable external storage device. For example someone
buying a 64GB USB drive or higher, will not be looking to only copy a couple
of pictures. Instead, they will be looking to back up hard-disks, copy entire
music and movie libraries and thousands of pictures. There will be a flood of
motherboards offering USB 3.0 as a standard in 2011, thus further driving
adoption of USB 3.0 drives as the product of choice for personal mobile
storage and large capacity backup.

The role of USB

With more than 3 billion App Store downloads this year and 10 billion
iTunes downloaded, people create, share and consume more content than ever
before. As content continues to grow the role of the USB is going to evolve
from being purely a storage device to an active, essential part of a
consumers life to easily and reliably share, move and store their
content-anytime, anywhere.

Mobile Tablets and their storage potential

The mobile tablet market is just beginning to take off thanks to the
release of the iPad and other similar tablet devices. These intelligent
devices are designed to create a new experience in the way people interact
with content giving them access anytime, anywhere. The one limitation of the
currently available tablets is their rather small in-built storage. This will
lead to opportunities in 2011, where Flash-based products have a huge
potential to be used as added, external storage for these gadgets. Consumers
will be looking closely at what kind of external storage offerings can be
used in combination with their tablet that will satisfy their needs,
especially with fast transfer rates and additional security features being
top of the list.

Media Relations: Emilie Beneitez Lefebvre, Kingston Technology Europe Ltd, +44(0)1932-738813, ebeneitez at kingston-technology.com; Maggie Zaboura, Zaboura Consultancy Ltd, +44(0)7990-527278, maggie at zaboura.com